Review: ‘Plays for the Plague Year’ Is Too Close for Our Comfort
It would be one thing for Suzan-Lori Parks to have just written Plays for the Plague Year (Public Theater, to April 30), but she also performs it in a production that was initially delayed—irony alert—by the cast being struck down by COVID. Parks, the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, shares the stage with eight performers variously playing her husband, son, dear friends, the famous, cops, and colleagues—living and dead. An excellent band accompanies them.
The show is around three hours long, and takes place in The Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub. While eating fries with mayo or beet hummus may be conducive to the space’s vibe when a cabaret is playing, when watching Plays for the Plague Year a snack or cocktail may go a little more untouched. It is not material easy to chow down to.
Parks—with guitar–means the show to be an attempt to “bear witness” to what happened to her, and the world, during the pandemic. The show, she hopes, is akin to the “ghost light” in theaters—a symbol or sign that art persists whatever. She set out to write a play a day, but what we see on stage are not full-length plays, nowhere near. They are more potted moments, some from her own life with her husband and son, others inspired by big political and cultural moments. It is a pandemic pick-and-mix, a revue-style sweep through the terrible and familiar, a “banquet of the unbearable,” as Parks puts it. COVID itself is imagined as a kind of bejeweled diva, whose sheathed arms and mask you recoil from.